Wait For Me || John "Soap" MacTavish x OC (Call Of Duty)

21. Sergeant muscles and mohawk

Yael wished she had more time with Johnny before his sudden departure. More time to selfishly indulge in his closeness twelve months after their first meeting.

Instead, she surrendered to the evidence of those long-established shifts and the unlikely possibility of giving up her guard with so little notice. A move that would have trapped her in a difficult-to-repay debt.

She faced a quiet and interminable day shift, with the fresh memory of the sergeant asleep amidst the disheveled sheets and an unfulfilled desire before going to work.

Therefore, at the end of her shift, she entered the medical room with the air of a condemned person, a veiled migraine squeezing her temples and her heart tangled with feelings that had remained with Johnny on that warm bed in the brick house.

From the worn, faded leather sofa, Gary greeted her with a nod of his blond head, leaning back to catch her eye. In the silence of the room, the noise of the shiny potato chip bag in his long fingers echoed in her head at a hundred decibels.

"Williams!" he called out, chattily, ignoring her blatant bad mood: "Another shift together, how long has it been?"

He swallowed another couple of chips and Yael had the distinct feeling that she had never seen him eat anything else in her presence.

No matter what time of day it was, Gary Stevens nourished himself exclusively on junk food collected from the vending machines scattered throughout the emergency room. Nevertheless, despite some probable nutritional deficiencies, he was still an exceptionally skilled surgeon.

Sometimes she wondered how he managed to cope with the grueling shifts and long hours in the operating room with only energy drinks and a chocolate bar in his body. Or perhaps, her vision was simply altered by the presence of John MacTavish in her life, a vortex of carbohydrates, proteins, and whiskey.

"You're going to have a heart attack eating that rubbish all the time, Gary," Yael sighed, her small fingers freeing her neck from the black stethoscope in a nervous gesture. She threw it on the coffee table at her colleague's feet and let herself fall onto the sofa next to him with a thud.

She deliberately ignored the look of fiery satisfaction in the surgeon's blue eyes at that shred of intimacy.

"Nah, the pump is doing great," he mumbled with a smile that revealed his canines. He silently offered her his pack, which Yael refused before even smelling it.

The only time she had let herself be convinced to eat that junk with him during a night shift, she had found herself, three hours of surgery later, vomiting her soul into a special waste bin in the operating room. From that moment on, she had wisely kept her distance from anything in the hospital that wasn't served by human hands.

"You, rather. You're in a shit mood, Williams. You can see it from a mile away that something has ruined your day," he continued, his elbow hitting her arm in an eloquent gesture.

Yael hated to admit it, but Gary knew her more deeply than she had wanted to let on during their fleeting relationship. It was such a physical discomfort that, if she hadn't thought he would take advantage of it to make fun of her, she would have had herself checked out.

"Well, thanks a lot. I'll let you in on a secret, Stevens. Telling a girl she looks like shit doesn't help you win her heart," Yael sighed, rolling her head back against the worn back of the couch: "It's a long story, anyway."

She tried to look across the young surgeon's tired eyes, her feet propped up on the table and her small fingers absentmindedly scratching the blue uniform on her thin thighs in a nervous gesture.

"Nah, you're beautiful, Williams. I just said you're in a shit mood and I suspect Sergeant Muscles and Mohawk had something to do with it. What's up? Trouble in paradise?" he grinned with feigned nonchalance, his eyes scanning the bottom of the packet, and Yael felt herself flush.